Part 55 (1/2)

”You're enjoying it, aren't you, Hosey, h'm?”

”It's the life, mother! It's the life!”

His ruddy colour began to fade. He took to haunting department-store kitchenware sections. He would come home with a new kind of cream whipper, or a patent device for the bathroom. He would tinker happily with this, driving a nail, adjusting a screw. At such times he was even known to begin to whistle some sc.r.a.p of a doleful tune such as he used to hum. But he would change, quickly, into something lovely. The price of b.u.t.ter, eggs, milk, cream and the like horrified his Wisconsin cold-storage sensibilities. He used often to go down to Fulton Market before daylight and walk about among the stalls and shops, piled with tons of food of all kinds. He would talk to the marketmen, and the buyers and grocers, and come away feeling almost happy for a time.

Then, one day, with a sort of shock, he remembered a farmer he had known back home in Winnebago. He knew the farmers for miles around, naturally, in his business. This man had been a steady b.u.t.ter-and-egg acquaintance, one of the wealthy farmers in that prosperous farming community. For his family's sake he had moved into town, a ruddy, rufous-bearded, clumping fellow, intelligent, kindly. They had sold the farm with a fine profit and had taken a boxlike house on Franklin Street. He had nothing to do but enjoy himself. You saw him out on the porch early, very early summer mornings.

You saw him ambling about the yard, poking at a weed here, a plant there. A terrible loneliness was upon him; a loneliness for the soil he had deserted. And slowly, resistlessly, the soil pulled at him with its black strength and its green tendrils, down, down, until he ceased to struggle and lay there clasped gently to her breast, the mistress he had thought to desert and who had him again at last, and forever.

”I don't know what ailed him,” his widow had said, weeping. ”He just seemed to kind of pine away.”

It was one morning in April--one soft, golden April morning--when this memory had struck Hosey Brewster. He had been down at Fulton Market.

Something about the place--the dewy fresh vegetables, the crates of eggs, the b.u.t.ter, the cheese--had brought such a surge of homesickness to him as to amount to an actual nausea. Riding uptown in the subway he had caught a glimpse of himself in a slot-machine mirror. His face was pale and somehow shrunken. He looked at his hands. The skin hung loose where the little pads of fat had plumped them out.

”Gos.h.!.+” he said. ”Gosh, I--”

He thought, then, of the red-faced farmer who used to come clumping into the cold-storage warehouse in his big boots and his buffalo coat. A great fear swept over him and left him weak and sick.

The chill grandeur of the studio-building foyer stabbed him. The glittering lift made him dizzy, somehow, this morning. He shouldn't have gone out without some breakfast perhaps. He walked down the flagged corridor softly; turned the key ever so cautiously. She might still be sleeping. He turned the k.n.o.b, gently; tiptoed in and, turning, fell over a heavy wooden object that lay directly in his path in the dim little hall. A barked s.h.i.+n. A good round oath.

”Hosey! What's the matter? What--” She came running to him. She led him into the bright front room.

”What was that thing? A box or something, right there in front of the door. What the--”

”Oh, I'm so sorry, Hosey. You sometimes have breakfast downtown. I didn't know-”

Something in her voice--he stopped rubbing the injured s.h.i.+n to look up at her. Then he straightened slowly, his mouth ludicrously open. Her head was bound in a white towel. Her skirt was pinned back. Her sleeves were rolled up. Chairs, tables, rugs, ornaments were huddled in a promiscuous heap. Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster was cleaning house.

”Milly!” he began, sternly. ”And that's just the thing you came here to get away from. If Pinky--”

”I didn't mean to, father. But when I got up this morning there was a letter--a letter from the woman who owns this apartment, you know. She asked if I'd go to the hall closet--the one she reserved for her own things, you know--and unlock it, and get out a box she told me about, and have the hall boy express it to her. And I did, and--look!”

Limping a little he followed her. She turned on the light that hung in the closet. Boxes--pasteboard boxes--each one bearing a cryptic penciling on the end that stared out at you. ”Drp Stud Win,” said one; ”Sum Slp Cov Bedrm,” another; ”Toil. Set & Pic. Frms.”

Mrs Brewster turned to her husband, almost shamefacedly, and yet with a little air of defiance. ”It--I don't know--it made me--not homesick, Hosey. Not homesick, exactly; but--well, I guess I'm not the only woman with a walnut streak in her modern make-up. Here's the woman--she came to the door with her hat on, and yet--”

Truth--blinding, white-hot truth--burst in upon him. ”Mother,” he said--and he stood up, suddenly robust, virile, alert--”mother, let's go home.”

Mechanically she began to unpin the looped-back skirt.

”When?”

”Now.”

”But, Hosey! Pinky--this flat--until June--”

”Now! Unless you want to stay. Unless you like it here in this--this make-believe, double-barreled, duplex do-funny of a studio thing. Let's go home, mother. Let's go home--and breathe.”

In Wisconsin you are likely to find snow in April--snow or slush. The Brewsters found both. Yet on their way up from the station in 'Gene Buck's flivver taxi, they beamed out at it as if it were a carpet of daisies.

At the corner of Elm and Jackson Streets Hosey Brewster stuck his head out of the window. ”Stop here a minute, will you, 'Gene?”